1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, information processing method, and computer program and, in particular, to a suitable technique used to distribute and output a print job generated by inserting insertion data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the recent increase in the speed and image quality of printing apparatuses using an electrophotographic method or ink-jet method, a print on demand market is emerging. The print on demand market will be expressed as a POD market hereinafter as needed. The POD market aims at handling a job of relatively small lot (e.g., a job of lot smaller than that handled by a printing apparatus) in a short delivery time without using a large-scale apparatus or system. Hence, the POD market implements digital printing using electronic data by making the most of a digital image forming apparatus such as a digital copy machine or digital multi-functional peripheral equipment in place of a printing method using a large-scale printing apparatus. In the POD market, business is conducted using printed products obtained by digital printing.
In this POD market, digitization has progressed, and management and control using computers have penetrated as compared to the conventional commercial printing industry. Utilization of computers is making the level of printed products in the recent POD market closer to that in the conventional commercial printing industry to some degree. Under these circumstances, PFP (Print For Pay), CRD (Centralized Reproduction Department), and the like exist in the POD market. The PFP has been implemented as a print service in copy print shops. The CRD has been implemented as a print service oriented to an intra-company (in-house) process.
One of the techniques used in the POD market is so-called VDP (Variable Data Print) that takes advantage of the characteristic features of a digital image forming apparatus. This technique prints contents which change in accordance with variable data (also referred to as insertion data) in, for example, a database. The VDP is usable for, for example, direct mail (DM) for providing information that changes for each customer in accordance with customer information or a billing statement that changes numerical values in accordance with the use state of, for example, heat and electricity. For this reason, the VDP has rapidly widespread in a market for creating, for example, direct mail (DM).
In the VDP, the amount of printing is enormous in many cases. To cope with this, the speed of image formation processing and that of print processing need to be higher. To increase the processing speed, a distributed printing system which prints using a plurality of printers simultaneously is used.
In the distributed printing system, created print jobs are distributed to a plurality of printers. For example, each print job is distributed such that the first print job is distributed to a printer A, and the second print job is distributed to a printer B. In this case, the VDP system can simultaneously operate the printers A and B by sending a print job to the printer B before the printer A finishes output. It is therefore possible to quickly finish print processing as compared to an arrangement using only one VDP system and one printer.
As described above, when the distributed printing system is used, the speed of print processing can be increased. To further speed up the print processing, it is necessary to increase the ratio of time in which all printers in the distributed printing system are executing print processing and make a print standby time without print processing of the printers as short as possible. That is, the VDP system must efficiently put print jobs in the printers.
To do this, conventionally, the VDP system monitors the status of each printer and preferentially sends a print job to a printer in a print standby status.
A host computer analyzes print data (document data) of each page and sends print data of a page determined to contain color data to a printing apparatus that supports color printing. On the other hand, the host computer sends print data of a page determined to be a monochrome page to a printing apparatus that supports monochrome printing. This technique is described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-265362.
However, the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-265362 may be unable to efficiently execute print processing if, for example, document data of 100 pages includes color data in pages 1 to 50 and monochrome data in pages 51 to 100. That is, since the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-265362 executes print processing in the order of pages, the monochrome printer starts print processing after generation of the print data of page 51.
Hence, the technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-265362 may be unable to implement parallel processing using a plurality of printers.